Editorial: GOP tries blacklisting

The Republican Party is not only increasingly tone deaf politically, but it is dogged by bad timing of its own doing.

At its annual summer meeting, the Republican National Committee announced a major outreach program to minority voters just as the GOP-dominated North Carolina legislature enacted a series of laws making it more difficult for minorities to vote.

Then the RNC voted unanimously Friday to ban the party’s 2016 presidential debates from CNN and NBC because of a planned CNN feature-length film on the life of Hillary Clinton and a planned four-hour NBC miniseries on the former first lady and secretary of state.

The party’s leadership blacklisted the films even though not only has nobody seen them, they have yet to be made. Regardless of your political leanings, this is a particularly heavy-handed and clumsy attempt at censorship.

The party is still smarting over the 2011 and 2012 folly of having more than 20 debates. That was not only too many, but served to air the party’s internecine feuds. And there seemed to be no threshold of political viability to participate. That’s hardly an indication of media bias.

The GOP seeks to regard the presidential debates as commercials, rather than as a serious test of ideas. Evidence of that is the consideration of having right-wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin moderate the debates.

If CNN and NBC are eventually banned, they always have the option of counterprogramming, running at the same time as the Republican debates something like “The Best of Duck Dynasty.” We think the party will come around.